환생한 마녀: 숙부님, 당신이 선택받았습니다

In her previous life, Helia, the last Moon-blood witch of the House of Ashford, gave everything for Dreko Thornwood, the young master of the Thornwood witch clan. For seven years, she took fatal strikes for him, drained the foundations of Ashford’s legacy to build his rise, and step by step placed him upon the throne of the Sorcerer King. Yet Dreko mistook the wild witch Nyxa for his true savior and showered her with favor. On the night when the Blood Moon burned brightest, he tore up their blood pact before the assembly, joined forces with Nyxa, and nailed Helia to the sacrificial altar. The hot iron branded the traitor’s curse upon her flesh. The Moon-blood that ran through her very veins was ripped from its core, scattering into a million silver sparks in the sky. Nyxa smiled and told her that her husband, her family, everything she had—would all be hers to take. At the brink of death, Caurus Thornwood—Dreko’s uncle, the former Sorcerer King reviled by the entire clan as the “Staffless One”—charged through the blood-flame onto the execution platform, his body drenched in wounds, shielding her with his own flesh. She watched him die before her very eyes. In her final moment, Helia offered her last tear to the Moon Goddess and prayed for one chance to start over. When she opened her eyes again, Helia was back at the Blood Moon Feast of her eighteenth year. The elders of the Blood Moon Council were reading the sacred oracle of the blood pact. Dreko sat there, smug and certain, waiting for her to run to him in tears. Instead, she broke off the engagement before the entire hall, crossed the vast assembly chamber, and walked toward the figure in the shadows—Caurus—and declared aloud: “I choose him.” In this life, she would undo the old binding seal upon Caurus with her own hands and restore the true Sorcerer King to his throne. She would tear off Nyxa’s mask of false piety and grind her from the clouds back into the mud. And she would make sure that Dreko, after regaining the memories of his past life, would watch her stand beside Caurus upon the royal dais—yearning forever, yet never attaining. The one she had wrongfully given her heart to in her past life—in this life, he would only kneel and gaze up at her from below. And the man who should have guarded her all along—she finally dared to take his hand and say, “This time, let me protect you.”